Violence Against Women on the Rise in the Dominican Republic.
| Autor | Giron, Crosby |
Participants in the first Latin America and Caribbean Feminist Encuentros (Encounters), which took place in 1981, declared Nov. 25 as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. They were honoring three sisters from the Dominican Republic--Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa Mirabal--who lost their lives on that day in 1960 for defying the Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930-1961) dictatorship.
Since then, the UN has singled out Nov. 25 as a day to speak out against gender-based violence throughout the world and to demand public policies to fight it.
Yet according to a report published by the UN Development Program (UNDP), UN Women, and the Dominican office for women's issues (Ministerio de la Mujer), femicide rates in the Dominican Republic are on the increase, and two out of five women killed in the country are victims of domestic violence.
The report concludes that although the Dominican Republic has the necessary mechanisms and policies in place to fight gender-based violence, the country continues to have one of the highest femicide rates in the region. El Salvador has the worst statistics for Latin America (NotiCen, Jan. 5, 2017). According to UNDP figures, 88 femicides were reported in the Dominican Republic in 2016 and 83 from January to October 2017.
Violence in the home
Statistics published by the health ministry (Ministerio de Salud Publica) show that 35% of Dominican women have been subjected to violence by their partners, while 26% reported they had had at least one experience of physical violence.
Figures released by the Attorney General's Office in 2016 are even grimmer, showing that 1,078 femicides were recorded in the Dominican Republic between 2005 and 2015. More than half of the murders, it said, were committed by the women's current or former partners. Dominican girls aged 15 to 19 are the most vulnerable in terms of suffering violence during pregnancy (11% as opposed to 6.3% percent of women aged 40 to 49).
One in 10 Dominican women have suffered sexual violence at some point in their lives, and around one in 20 had done so during the 12 months before the survey. In most cases of rape (80%), the perpetrator was the victim's partner or former partner.
The Centro de Estudios de Genero (CEG-INTEC) a center for gender studies at the Instituto Tecnologico de Santo Domingo assessed the situation of Dominican women in 2016 and concluded that femicide decreased in all countries in Latin America, with the...
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